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Sunday, October 23, 2011

Book Review: The Dark Wife by Sarah Diemer

ISBN: 1461179939
Published: May 12th, 2011
Publisher: self-published
Read from August 16th to October 2nd, 2011
Synopsis from Goodreads:

Three thousand years ago, a god told a lie. Now, only a goddess can tell the truth.

Persephone has everything a daughter of Zeus could want--except for freedom. She lives on the green earth with her mother, Demeter, growing up beneath the ever-watchful eyes of the gods and goddesses on Mount Olympus. But when Persephone meets the enigmatic Hades, she experiences something new: choice.

Zeus calls Hades "lord" of the dead as a joke. In truth, Hades is the goddess of the underworld, and no friend of Zeus. She offers Persephone sanctuary in her land of the dead, so the young goddess may escape her Olympian destiny.

But Persephone finds more than freedom in the underworld. She finds love, and herself.

The Dark Wife is a YA novel, a lesbian revisionist retelling of the Persephone and Hades myth.

Review:

I really enjoyed The Dark Wife. I've always been interested with Greek and Roman mythology. I'd heard of the myth of Hades and Persephone before, but I didn't know much about it. I found myself looking up things about the original myth as I was reading The Dark Wife. It was very interesting.

I really loved the way this was written. I imagine it could be hard to write about gods, since you typically imagine gods to be perfect, but I thought all of the characters where written really well. They were gods and not like normal humans, but many of them, particularly Persephone were relatable. Zeus was infuriating, but I've never liked him anyway. (Freshmen year, we had to research a Greek/Roman god that was assigned to us. I got Zeus/Jupiter, and I pretty much started hating him from the very beginning.)

I also loved the way the underworld was described. I found that a really interesting aspect of the story. It was very interesting to read about. When Persephone was first entering the underworld (I don't think that is really a spoiler.), I couldn't wait to read about what the underworld was like.

I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who's interested in Greek mythology. It's a great book.

I recieved this book for free from the author in exchange for a fair and honest review. This in no way affected my opinion of the book.

Note: I usually post a link to buy the book on Amazon, but that doesn't seem to want to work at the moment. I'll try to fix it later.

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About Me

I'm 24 and recently graduated from college with an English and secondary education degree. Currently, I'm teaching English in Japan (on the island of Shikoku). I've been a reader for as long as I can remember, and at some point that bled into writing as well. I'm a huge nerd and obsessed with tons of different things, which I enjoy getting overly excited about on a regular basis.